1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, systems, and products for cascading failover of blade servers in a data center.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the modern computer era. Since that time, computer devices have evolved into extremely complicated systems, much more sophisticated and complex than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Complex, sophisticated computer systems today are often organized in large data centers. Blade computers in such data centers are increasingly used to run critical applications that require a high level of redundancy and fault tolerance. Modern data centers employ various failover schemes whereby the failure of one blade server can trigger an automatic replacement of that server from a pre-established backup pool of standby servers. In this way, a catastrophic loss or serious degradation of performance in one server in a data center with thousands of blade servers will trigger the automatic introduction of another server to continue the original server's workload. In prior art systems, however, the technology is primarily focused on the availability of standby resources for such failover. As such, there is a risk that over time, these backup pools of systems may not contain any system that is optimized for the workload currently running on a primary system.